Security

Spamhaus hit by DDoS attack, not executed by Anonymous

Spamhaus, the well-known anti-spam DNS blacklist service, has been hit by a severe DDoS attack over the weekend. Users have been informed by Spamhaus of certain services like their website and email server being unavailable, with them working to get things back online yesterday.

At first it was noted by SoftpPedia that Anonymous was behind the attack, however Spamhaus themselves have provided an update on their website stating that this is not true, and that a Russian / Eastern European cybercrime gang was behind the attack.

An update was posted on Pastebin called ‘Operation Stophaus‘, demanding that the Spamhaus Project should stop their activities.

A quote of the pastebin:

Spamhaus has recently blackmailed several multinational carriers into disconnecting clients, breaching their own contracts, without any legal procedure whatsoever, and pretty much everyone on the internet so-far has feared spamhaus too much to report them to the authorities, wether they have a legal department to do so or not. reporting spamhaus to the authorities has shown to result in more listings, such as on their DROP list, which breaks access to significant parts of the internet completely. Spamhaus advertising its use as such, constitutes to breach of the UK Computer Sabotage Act. they know that by listing anything on DROP, they’re breaking internet access (at least partially), and use it as a means to terrorize people into giving them their way.

Spamhaus noted in their update that the above was posted by a disgruntled spammer, and not by anonymous.